The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  “It ain’t right, you asking me this.” Upton pulled a pen from his desk and modified Gripper’s manifest to include his friend.

  “This might be our last patrol,” said Manuel. “Most of you will go home with at least a Combat Action Ribbon. What about me? If you look at my uniform or service record, it’ll be like this never happened.”

  “No, you don’t deserve that.” Upton scribbled a revision onto the manifest and handed it to Manuel. “Make sure to drop this by the ops center on your way out.”

  He grabbed the sheet of paper and rushed up two more levels to the top of the Dam. The air outside was crisp, and it stung almost. The warm summer nights were gone. The days were still hot, but everything was cooling. Manuel remembered the desert’s otherworldly cold when they’d arrived the year before. He was glad they’d miss the winter.

  A road ran along the top of the Dam, an abutment flanking its sides. Past it, spreading in one direction, were Lake Qadisiyah’s black waters and in the other a drop, falling hundreds of feet down a sloping wall and into the churning Euphrates. Manuel didn’t like standing on the road. He’d never learned to swim and didn’t care for heights. Two Humvees were parked outside of the ops center. The stars glinted off their windshields. They would drop Gripper and him at the checkpoint.

  Inside the ops center, a sleepy lance corporal sat behind a green wall of radios that were stacked in a pattern like bricks. The room was warm and filled with static. The lance corporal swiveled around in his chair. “Evening, Sergeant.” His front was drizzled with potato chips and their grease spread from his chest up to his pimpled face.

  “What’s going on, Shaughnessy?”

  “You lookin’ at it.”

  Across the ops center Manuel’s body armor, helmet, and rifle were stored in a small dusty cubby. Two grenades hung by their spoons off his body armor. The grenades’ pins were secured with black electrical tape. The tape hadn’t moved in seven months. It’d begun to peel.

  “You heading out?” asked Shaughnessy.

  “Last-minute add-on with Gripper,” said Manuel. “He been in yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  Manuel handed Shaughnessy the new manifest. He tacked it over the old one on the mission tracking board, an acetate covered map that papered one full wall of the ops center.

  Manuel sat on a bench near the door with his body armor strapped on and his helmet perched on his knee. Shaughnessy came over with a pot of coffee and two Styrofoam cups. He set the cups on the bench between the two of them.

  “Schedule says this is the last mission,” said Shaughnessy.

  “Looks that way.”

  “They got any more room?”

  “When you add me, I think they’re full up,” said Manuel.

  “Working in headquarters makes for a long deployment.”

  “You got nothing to complain about. You got yours a couple months ago,” said Manuel, and he felt petty.

  Shaughnessy crossed the room and pointed to a patched hole in the corrugated steel ceiling. “I’d say that rocket hit about,” he opened his arms nearly as wide as they could go, “this far from my desk.”

  “Still, you’re a lucky motherfucker.”

  “I guess, lucky to get mine, and lucky not to get killed getting it.” He looked back up at the hole. “You think I really rate it?” he asked.

  “Hey, man, a Combat Action Ribbon is a Combat Action Ribbon.”

  “Yeah, but do you think it counts?”

  “If it could’ve killed you it counts.”

  “Too bad you weren’t here that day,” said Shaughnessy. “I mean too bad that you missed it all.”

  “That’s all right, you can’t chase it,” he lied, and the room became awkward because he was chasing it. Shaughnessy leaned back in his chair and stared at the radio, munching potato chips. Manuel crossed the room and lay on a bench by the door. He’d get some sleep before he left.

  The door slammed by Manuel’s head. In front of him stood Gripper, his face swollen with early morning exhaustion. He crossed the room like a sleepwalker. In seven months, he’d made a hundred patrols like this.

  “Hey, Gripper,” said Shaughnessy.

  He nodded, checking the manifest on the board with the enormous hands that were his namesake. Then he hooked his thumbs into his shoulder straps, hanging them from the body armor he wore like a second skin.

  “So you worked it out, Manny?” he asked, still reviewing the manifest.

  “Yeah, we’re good.”

  “All right, the trucks are warming up outside.”

  Manuel snapped on his chin-strap and slung his rifle across his chest. He followed Gripper.

  “Good luck!” shouted Shaughnessy.

  Manuel didn’t know what type of luck he hoped for.

  On the road that ran across the Dam, the two Humvees coughed and sputtered, mixing warm air with cold. Their windshields vibrated and reflected a blurred night sky. Inside the cab, the Marines fogged the glass and kept wiping crusts of frost from it with their sleeves. Five of them would be dropped off between the two checkpoints: three at 52, and two at 67.

  Manuel climbed into the back of the second Humvee and Gripper perched next to him. “You trying to keep an eye on me?” asked Manuel.

  “I’m trying to be a good host.”

  “Just tell me where you need me.”

  “We’re going to the 67,” said Gripper. He banged on the roof of the cab. The Humvees lurched into gear. In the bed everything became wind and blackness. They crossed the Dam and even though Manuel couldn’t see, he felt the lake and the river slip from either side of him.

  They drove through the night as though the morning wasn’t inevitable, but a destination on the map to be achieved. Every few kilometers, the road sunk into the wadis and then rose back onto the plain: shambles of rock and dust. When the first seam of light split the horizon, Manuel felt crushed by the desert and the road and his own smallness against them. Distant and near cyclones swirled up the dust, spooling it like squid ink across the ocean floor, but keeping speed with the convoy and at times outpacing it.

  The 67 came into view. The dawn was soiled grey, overcast. At first, in the distance, the blanched mud tower looked no different than one of the cyclones that chased them, its earthen walls blending with the desert. But as they approached, Manuel could see two dark figures running down the ladder that leaned against its one side.

  They pulled next to the tower. Two Marines charged up to the convoy before it could stop rolling. A light coating of dust covered their reddened, windburned faces.

  “This is our stop,” said Gripper as he jumped off the tailgate.

  Manuel followed.

  Watching from the tower above were the Iraqis, three of them. Their powder blue police uniforms had turned navy with sweat, and their eyes were dark like their sweaty shirts.

  The two Marines coming off post climbed into the truck’s bed.

  “They give you any trouble?” Gripper asked them.

  “No trouble, they’re just on their own fucking program,” said one of them, who also had a grenade hung on his vest, but its tape was newer, a replacement for one that’d been thrown.

  “What program is that?” asked Manuel.

  “They’re just not in a rush, know what I mean?”

  “Looks like you’re in a rush to get out of here,” said Manuel.

  “Ain’t you?” asked the second Marine who carried a flare on his vest.

  “I just got here.”

  Gripper heaved up the tailgate, slamming it shut. The Marine with the flare pressed it into Gripper’s hand. “They moved the radio to the 52. Anything happens signal with this.”

  The convoy lurched down the road. Manuel looked into the tower and at the Iraqis who stood in the doorway. He wondered when someone would come by to pick them up.

  And then it began to rain.

  Inside, the rain hit the corrugated steel roof, loud as gravel, filling the silence with something aside from conver
sation. The three Iraqis sat in one corner of the tower. Manuel and Gripper sat in the other, near the wood ladder, which ran from a cut in the parapet to the ground. The Iraqis didn’t speak, not even to each other. Manuel stared at them, but they didn’t seem to notice. Their faces were wrinkled, but appeared neither old nor young. The lines transmuted age as though they’d been born with them, like a man’s fate is born into his palm. There was no hurry or patience in their expressions, merely indifference. And as Manuel watched them, that is what he couldn’t understand.

  “Don’t they have any rifles?” he asked Gripper.

  “Yes, but they prefer not to carry them.”

  “What if they’re attacked?”

  “They’re only attacked when we’re here.”

  “Well, what then?”

  “We’ve got rifles.”

  “And so they just sit there?”

  “More or less.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?” Manuel asked.

  “As long as they stay out of the way, I don’t care what they do.”

  One of the Iraqis walked in a crouch to where Manuel and Gripper sat. He pantomimed for them to move. He removed his plastic sandals and sat on the threshold with his dusty feet hanging in the storm. His cracked skin soon turned smooth in the rain.

  “Do you need to do that there, Moe?” bitched Gripper.

  The Iraqi, Moe, shrugged, rubbing his feet. Manuel didn’t bother to ask where the name Moe came from. It was said with an irony that made him doubt it was Mo, as in Mohammed, or any other abbreviation of an eastern name. The thick black bowler cut and surly expression made it obvious that Moe’s namesake, as far as Gripper was concerned, was Moe from The Three Stooges.

  “These people wash their feet five times a day, but still wipe their asses with their left hand,” said Manuel. Through the storm’s grey veil, he looked down the road. It ran across the land like a warped floor in a bad house. “It cracks me up, I can’t get over it.”

  “Makes the little fuckers endearing, don’t it?” said Gripper.

  “What? The feet part or the ass part?”

  “Their contradictions.” Gripper stepped away from the door and stood deeper inside the tower looking at the other two Iraqis who napped in the corner without apology. Manuel didn’t move. He sat in the threshold watching the wet desert.

  Aside from the mud tower, the checkpoint consisted of two fluorescent cones and a single spike-strip. The spike-strip was nearly invisible (hence the cones), and it lay across the pavement like a chain of sawtooth jacks. Manuel and Gripper set a rotation so one could rest while the other watched the road. Manuel offered to go first even though he needed the sleep. Gripper curled up in the tower’s dank corner next to the Iraqis. The four of them lay like a pack of sodden dogs.

  The day wore on and the desert flooded. Water pooled, breaking apart the cheap macadam and swallowing whole segments of the road. From time to time in the distance, a car emerged through the slashing curtains of rain, always tentative, paying great respect to the distant cones. Manuel would leave the tower’s protection and search the approaching vehicle with courtesy, never forcing the occupants to stand outside with him in the rain. But all this courtesy belied his secret hope that someone in the car would shoot at him, just so he could shoot back and get his Combat Action Ribbon.

  But the morning proved disappointing. Each time he left the tower to remove the spike-strip and let someone pass, it felt like a little defeat. He’d return soaked, and it was well before noon when he decided that on the whole damn stretch of road the only threat that existed was the one to his ego.

  Standing in the door of the tower, Manuel kicked the bottom of Moe’s feet, waking him from his nap. He crossed the mud floor, slid on his plastic sandals, and stood next to Manuel. They looked out to the road. Moe carried a plastic sheet and a single tent rod. He watched the rain, and after a moment rested his hand on Manuel’s shoulder. Manuel glanced at Moe’s hand. Moe smiled, revealing a mosaic of rot and gold. He looked at his watch and nodded. There were no cars coming, but he rushed down the ladder and ran into the rain to take his post.

  By now, Gripper had awoken as well. “I got this shift, Manny,” he said as he stretched and pulled the sleep from his joints.

  “Looks like you’ll have company.”

  On the side of the road Moe had propped his waterproof sheet up with the tent pole, protecting him from the rain while he sat in a puddle.

  Manuel handed over the flare.

  “Fuckin’ Moe,” said Gripper, watching the wet Iraqi.

  Manuel leaned against the tower’s mud walls and slept upright, his head slinking into his body armor like a turtle’s to its shell. With sleep came anxiety. Manuel stacked his troubles one on the other and his dreams worked like cement, setting his worries into a wall he couldn’t see over. He dreamed, and in it, he was home without his Combat Action Ribbon; it was years later and he was scanning a promotion list, dread pouring warmly through his guts; he couldn’t find his name—he’d been passed over. He could already feel the dull shame of standing in line for early retirement, and the soul-sucking void of a regular job. He could hear his wife’s chipper steps around the house, happy at first that he was around, but ceding to disappointment as she wondered why she’d married someone who’d lost his purpose before forty, and what did that say about her, and he felt a sharp lonely twist as he watched her fade away. He cried in his dreams, or for real, he couldn’t tell, but he felt that tearful tension release like gas through a pinhole, slowly, with tiny whines, each one a mean little affirmation of how small he was.

  Manuel awoke and looked out to the road, to the rain. Gripper and Moe sat back-to-back under the waterproof sheet. Each of them watched one direction. Neither spoke. Instead they ate, sharing the M&Ms, crackers, and peanut butter from an MRE. They passed food back and forth over their shoulders. When Moe took the last M&M and handed Gripper back the empty wrapper, Gripper elbowed him in the ribs, hard. Moe laughed, but as soon as he started he quit.

  He came to his feet.

  A white compact Opal wove around the cone without stopping. There was a splash of water, the spike-strip cracked like the cluck of a great steel tongue. Then everything became translucent ripples of light and dark, water and metal, barreling down the road.

  Manuel saw the crash, but it was the long grinding skid of metal on asphalt that scared him. Hearing this, the other two Iraqis pressed behind him on the ladder. All three craned their necks outside. The Opal was flipped over in the road, its wheels still spinning. The twist of its undercarriage faced upward, a metallic disembowelment. Even in the rain flames licked up its side. The shrieks from inside the car sounded out of place, inanimate, as though the car, not its passengers, were calling out.

  Off the road some, and away from the car, were Gripper and Moe. They both lay in the mud, not moving. Gripper’s rifle had been tossed near the tower, splintered with a toothpick’s ease. Manuel looked at the two Iraqis who stood next to him. They looked away. He rushed down the ladder, outside and alone.

  While Manuel ran, Gripper pushed himself from the water and crawled toward Moe who was facedown in a puddle, unconscious and drowning. Manuel got there first. He fell to his knees, grabbed Moe by both shoulders and heaved his face toward the air. As he rolled him over, his joints ground against each other like crisped rice, and his mangled expression looked like the car’s chassis.

  Gripper continued to pull himself through the mud on his stomach. His legs hung behind him, limp and heavy as rope. Each pull became a great effort, all panting breathes and curses. He wanted to get to Moe.

  Manuel called to him, “Gripper!”

  He stopped, and propped himself up on his elbows, heaving. He said nothing but looked up. There was nothing to say, and he collapsed onto his side and into the mud.

  The shrieks on the road were reaching a high-pitched crescendo. The flames that had lightly lapped a moment before now chewed at the inside of the car. Curiosity not compassion
compelled Manuel toward the accident. Fuel, water, and blood mixed in the rain pools. Manuel pitched onto his hands and knees to look inside. The two front seats had been crushed, killing those in them. There, the fire burned hottest, marching irresistibly from hood to trunk. The shrieking became very loud now. Manuel scrambled around the car, unable to see from where. Then he looked into the rear windshield and saw her in the backseat. She punched at the glass with her palms. Manuel shouted for her to come forward and escape through the door, but he soon realized, as she had, that this would put her into the flames.

  Manuel left her and ran up the road. Soon the shrieks became lower, guttural, and as he ran he wondered if she were burning. He came back with the spike-strip. The flames now consumed every part of the car. For a moment he stood motionless, afraid, and defeated. Then he heard the banging on the glass. He slid beneath the upturned rear fender and into the flames. He held a segment of the spike-strip and swung it at the back windshield, shattering the glass. He smelled burnt hair. His own? He kicked at the windshield. It came apart. He reached for the woman inside. She jumped at him, arms out, clawing, trampling his body, pinning it to the ground. There was a new burning smell, his hands tingled then his shoulders. He pushed out behind her, but his vest was caught. He kicked his feet—he was pinned. The flames lapped up his legs. He tugged again, hard, and came free. He felt the grenade come loose and roll to the ground. Despite the growling of the flames, he could hear the spoon pop off and the fuse hiss. He scrambled from beneath the car, then he felt everything lift: first above the clouds, then into the blue sky, and beyond that, to where the curve of everything trends toward darkness.

  The sun scooped out the clouds, every now and then warming his face. Manuel looked around for Gripper. Next to him was Moe’s plastic sheet and a bundle wrapped inside it, feet coming out the end. The bundle was big, but not big enough to be Gripper. On his other side laid the woman, her wet skirts pressed tightly against her body. Her skin was sickly translucent, her stomach round and pregnant, heaving. His skin did not look like hers, it was not as badly raw. His head throbbed.